Forum: What’s Your Reaction to Barack Hussein Obama’s New Speech?

Tags

Barack Obama

Every week, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question: What’s Your Reaction to Barack Hussein Obama’s New Speech?

 Jeffrey Avalon Friedberg: I  didn’t read it, or hear it.

Obama, is—and has always been—a lying bastard.

1. He lied some 32 times about Obamacare.
2. His “parents” were never legally married.

Also, what the hell is the deal here ?

Obama was born a Muslim, and is still alive, so, he must still—according to Sharia Law—be a Muslim.

His legal name after he was adopted by his Indonesian stepfather is Barry Soetoro, and he has never, ever legally changed it to his self-chosen, warlike, Arabic names. And there is no evidence—not anywhere—that he has done so.

Early written material, apparently published by him, says he was born in Kenya.

His alleged birth certificate—to me, and I have seen many of them in 35 years as a licensed private investigator—appears to be a poorly made, computer-generated fraud.

Both times he was “elected” he was secretly sworn in twice—each time. Using both alleged names?

Records about his life and education are sealed and not available to anybody.

Who is he?

 Patrick O’Hannigan: My answer isn’t as colorful as Jeffrey’s, but I did not read or listen to Obama’s recent speech, either. I was amused by one caller I heard on Rush Limbaugh’s show, where Ken Matthews (?) was guest hosting. The caller said Obama had tried to take credit for the Trump economy. He said that reminded him of when he was a kid, and his mother would strive to open a peanut butter jar before giving up and handing it to him. When he then opened the jar, she’d say, “See! I loosened it for ya.” But the funny analogy did not quite fit (according to the caller), because Obama not only did NOT “loosen the lid” for Donald Trump; he (Obama) was twisting it the wrong way.

Rob Miller: I did see Obama’s new speech, as well as a transcript. One thing few people noticed is that Obama didn’t once refer to his successor as  ‘President Trump.’

Other than that, it was quite typical. Filled with classless behavior, mistruths, self-aggrandizement and whining while taking credit for the work and accomplishments of far better men as well as lying about his own ‘accomplishments.’

What were they?

He weakened America at every turn, from our military to our basic institutions like the courts, our healthcare system and academia. Obama came close to ruining the economy and ran up more debt with less to show for it than all his predecessors combined. As president , he went out of his way to exacerbate racial tensions, happily militarized government agencies to go after those he considered his political foes and ended by gifting our sworn enemy, one who was complicit in 9/11 with billions of dollars.

It doesn’t matter, really. The Left will always love him , because he came the closest of any American president of turning America into a socialist hellhole. And of course, because he was the first black president.

He got every benefit and boost up the ladder America has to offer and worked for very little of it. The historians in academia  will paint him in glowing terms, but he remains a classic example of the bird who deliberately crapped in his own nest and did his best to foul it beyond redemption.

Fausta Rodriquez Wertz: I wasn’t interested in watching. Former president. Yesterday’s news.

Laura Rambeau Lee:  I had two immediate reactions.  President Obama, you didn’t build that! And thankfully …President Obama is #NotMyPresident anymore.

Well, there it is!

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Forum: What Will Trump Do About Social Media Bias And Censorship?

Tags

President Donald J. Trump, social media censorship

Every week, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question: What Will Trump Do About Social Media Bias And Censorship?

Jeffrey Avalon Friedberg: What would I do? That’s simple, but not “polite,” because the time for that is long past.

Legally: I would….

I would do something to make their by-now-puckering asses hurt really really really really really bad.

I would do something they cannot afford.

I would lock up as many as possible and keep them there—witnesses, protection—whatever.

I would start the break up of any monopoly.

I would shut them all down as much as possible any way allowed.

Legally.

What will Trump do? Something similar to maybe only part of the above, but he will also make their heads explode via his Tweets, etc.—and spread their madness, like a plague of fleas up their hairy undies.

He will allow it to go on until it is much worse, and then he will set his machinery in motion.

Right now, this (his machinery) is all just waiting, poised—on standby….

“…not polite….”

Rob Miller : I think there’s some real meat here, and ironically, the Obama Administration paved the way. For one thing, the major Social Media sites are obviously colluding to effect the coming election. That’s illegal, especially since these sites call themselves public platforms. They also have a clear record of discrimination against certain points of view based on their own arbitrary whims, which are kept secret precisely so that they can be used in an arbitrary way and never ever revealed, merely referred to as ‘community standards.’ Since these are also media companies, this may very well be an FCC violation since sites that are banned or discriminated against in such a fashion are never informed of what violations they may have committed, if any. That is, besides having conservative views.

This combined with their open efforts to collude to influence elections could be real red meat. It might even lead to an anti-trust suit. And certainly to FCC and IRS examinations of, respectively, their corporate practices from a media standpoint and their finances, both on a corporate level and a personal one for their major executives.

Yes, these are private companies, but such companies have been successfully sued before for restraint of trade or other monopolistic practices. We’ll see.

At the very least considering how these companies bowed down to the Chinese and the EU, it might make them a lot less likely to act in such a biased manner.

Patrick O’Hannigan: I can’t remember where I first saw the idea (meaning either at “Instapundit” or “Ace of Spades”), but I do think the president and his administration can exploit the legal differences between “platforms” and “publishers.” Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media players like to think of themselves as platforms, because that allows them the fig leaf of neutrality between competing points of view. There are people who make a good case that these technologies are not platforms, so much as publishing apparatuses (apparati?). Publishers can be sued for libel, among other things. The other thing President Trump could do continues his current strategy of tweeting to his heart’s content, knowing that his tweets drive people crazy, while continuing to appoint lower-court judges, keep an eye on the FCC, etc. It’s sleight-of-hand, and it lets the president take advantage of the manufactured outrage directed against him 24/7 to get things done while the media wastes time on stupid questions like whether he honored the late Senator John McCain sufficiently (FWIW, I’m of the opinion that honors for McCain were over the top to begin with. Ronald Reagan didn’t get such fulsome praise when he died, and he’d done more for this country. Moreover, when Jeff Flake (“the other Senator from Arizona”) said of his late colleague, “Now he belongs to the ages,” he was deliberately borrowing a line first used by then Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to describe Abraham Lincoln at Lincoln’s death bed — and John McCain was not in Lincoln’s class).

Don Surber: President Trump knows the limitations of his power as president; he hasn’t fired Mueller. He will not use the government against the media.

But he also knows his power as the head of a rebellion, and he will continue to push back. Public opinion will change behaviors at Twitter and Facebook.

He is a president the Founding Fathers imagined: a fellow who actually puts country first, upholds the Constitution, respects the office, and does not abuse the power.

The reason is simple, he does not need the job. Fame and fortune, he had. He is an altruistic president along the lines of Coolidge, Eisenhower, and Reagan. He saw a need and filled it.

These are the best eight years of our lives. Enjoy. Mock the media and the critics, and have a blast!

Laura Rambeau Lee: President Trump understands the Constitutional limitations of his power, unlike his predecessor. In his position he speaks loudly and often on behalf of conservative voices and the unfair bias against them by the left-leaning social media platforms.

Hopefully he will continue being our tireless advocate and publicly bring attention and call out the media for their bias. The technology that allows us to communicate with one another can be a double edged sword, especially with the power and control being in the hands of very few individuals. It is up to Congress to pass laws against censorship and to protect everyone’s right to free speech. Our representatives must assure we all receive equal access and our voices not be censored with this rapidly growing and powerful technology. It’s great to know we have such a vocal advocate in the White House.

Well, there it is!

Make sure to drop by every Monday for the WoW! Magazine Forum. And enjoy WoW! Magazine 24-7 with some of the best stuff written in the ‘net. Take from me, you won’t want to miss it.

Forum: Pope Francis Now Opposes Capital Punishment. What Say You?

Every Monday, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question:  Pope Francis Now Opposes Capital Punishment. What Say You?

Scott Kirwin: As I’ve gotten older and become more mistrustful of government, I’ve had to reconcile that with my support of capital punishment. Giving the State that power when you don’t completely trust it seems contradictory, and the number of people exonerated after years on Death Row should give everyone pause.

I still support it at this time, but it’s not a strongly held, non-negotiable position like my support of Israel or gun rights is. The fact that this dippy Pope, who I have little respect for, opposes it really doesn’t affect my decision one way or another.

Jeffrey Avalon Friedberg : I was once blessed by a Pope when he came to visit Atlantic City, waayyyy back in the 1950’s, and blessed the entire ocean—with me in it.

I liked the just-previous Pope, and others prior to him. I like benign religion that gives people happiness and hope. Solace. A good and creative life. A beneficent Way to be. Order out of chaos.

I have been following the diatribes and rants of this current Pope. Catholics, have you had enough yet?

I have.

Without reading his statement on capital punishment I am going to disregard anything he says—based on his past performance as Pope. To me he is irrelevant in wisdom or religion. To me he is irrelevant as a thinker. He is irrelevant as a man. He is irrelevant.

To me, he is a foreign-born, socialist fraud. How he got to be Pope is a mystery—at least—to me. I speculate he was handpicked to help destroy America and bring the Church down further than it had already fallen.

At any moment I expect him to order Catholics to celebrate Ramadan. And some ancient Aztec feast.

Don Surber: Capital punishment was pivotal in the story of Christ. No execution, no resurrection. Life imprisonment is cruel, but sadly no longer unusual.

Patrick O’Hannigan: The reading I’ve done asserts that Pope Francis has modified the Catechism of the Catholic Church to say that the death penalty is “inadmissable.” This in contrast to what it had said, which was basically that the death penalty could only be legitimately applied in extreme circumstances where there were no other means of safeguarding the public. In the old days, the Papal States (precursors to Vatican City State) applied the death penalty.themselves, and even employed an official executioner. I fear that the change in perspective is a concession to self-proclaimed social justice warriors rather than an honest development of doctrine.

Death penalty opponents typically say that the problem with that is its finality. They mean that when you’re dead, it’s too late to repent of your sins, and preserving at least the chance for repentance is a recognition of inherent human dignity. That’s true as far as it goes, but it ignores potential similarities between capital punishment and the “death bed conversions” that you sometimes read about. Repentance need not take long. It need not come at the expense of justice, either.

Latin remains the official language of Church documents. That said, the word choice (in English) as it has been reported is telling, because it seems to leave a little wiggle room, in a kind of embarrassed acknowledgement of what the Catechism used to say. “Inadmissable” is a lawyerly word, not something typically found in moral theology texts. I’m reminded of the difference between “right” and “legal” (or “evil” and “illegal”). It’s a stretch that lay Catholics should not have to make, but something can be “inadmissible” without being “intrinsically evil.”

I also can’t help but wonder what this pope would make of “By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment,” which is a book that came out just last year. Edward Feser, one of the two people who wrote that scholarly but accessible book, has pointed out that popes have explicitly endorsed the death penalty on several occasions. He was also brave and smart enough to point out that slapping the label “development” on a contradiction does not make the so-called development a non-contradiction.

Laura Rambeau Lee: I suspect at least one reason my ancestors left Germany to come to the Colonies in the 1700s was to escape Catholicism, as they were Protestants and members of the German Reformed Church. Protestants believe no mortal man is a direct conduit to G-d and that our relationship with our Creator is a personal one, as is our interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. Pope Francis is advancing a globalist Marxist agenda under the guise of a holy man. His beliefs may very well bring about the destruction of the Catholic Church.

When there is no doubt of the guilt of the person and the crime was premeditated, capital punishment delivers justice and brings much needed closure to the loved ones of the victim. The reality is every one of us is going to die. Why should a murderer be permitted to take breath and enjoy this precious gift of life when they callously and cruelly chose to deprive another human being of this gift? Let the guilty repent and receive redemption from G-d in the afterlife, but here on earth they should be required to pay the ultimate price.

Well, there it is!

Make sure to drop by every Monday for the WoW! Magazine Forum. And enjoy WoW! Magazine 24-7 with some of the best stuff written in the ‘net. Take from me, you won’t want to miss it.

Forum: Why Is Racism Directed At Whites Or Asians Ignored?

Tags

bias against Asians, bias against Caucasians, denial, race and culture, racism in America

Every Monday, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question: Why is racism Directed At Whites And Asians Ignored?

Scott Kirwan:Because in the eyes of those who worry about such things it’s all about power, and they believe that whites have power. As for the Asians, well, they just don’t fit into that belief so they just ignore them.

The whites who believe this tend to come from upper class backgrounds where, surprise! They grew up with wealth and privilege and think their skin color had something to do with that.

My parents, on the other hand, had trouble making ends meet and as late as the 1950s skipped meals so their kids had full bellies. Depression-era survivors they inculcated a belief in us that all that mattered was education and hard work to succeed in life. Skin color didn’t matter, especially to my father who worked menial jobs alongside blacks and Hispanics until he died on the job in 1977.

Where was his white privilege? Or for that matter where was my mother’s who died 3 years ago, penniless after working until her mid-80s?

The SJWs don’t come from the South Side Chicago: they come from places like Martha’s Vineyard and Beverly Hills – and their guilt of being born with a silver spoon in their mouths gets transferred to their skin color, making it about the broader issue of race instead of the narrow topic of being born into great wealth. In a sense it’s the same ignorance and myopia that drove upper class Victorians to shoulder “the White Man’s Burden.”

Currently they hold the megaphone on race so until blacks, Hispanics and Asians rip it away from them, then all white people – including those of us not born into wealth – will be subject to their masochism.

Rob Miller:Actually, I see racism as a very useful tool of the Left.

For one thing, when you convince a portion of certain demographic that America is racist, and that only one political party is their sole guarantor of not only their basic rights but freebies they have become accustomed to because of course they deserve them, it gives you a solid voting bloc, particularly in urban fortresses where voter fraud is easy, and where a bloc vote can result in carrying a state. President Lyndon Johnson, among others knew this when he raided the Social Security trust fund to pay for the so-called war on poverty program to the tune of over a trillion 1960’s US dollars.

Not only that, but when you reward certain behavior like urban riots with that kind of largess and center blame on society rather than the perpetrators, something else happens. The behavior gets repeated and held over society’s head as a threat. Because it works.

Even the very idea of what racism is becomes distorted, because it becomes not just accepted but actually rewarded…depending on who it comes from.

Another thing that happens is that various parts of civil society start to become unraveled…like the idea of law and order applied equally, the ability of the police to keep civil order and the main concept America has always been based on, that it is a meritocracy, or at the very least a place where you can better yourself based on your own efforts. Once you start giving preference to people based on their race rather than their qualifications or their actual accomplishments, it destroys that ethic, and has the effect of lowering standards across the board as well as building resentment in the non-favored who lose out in the name of ‘diversity.’

That’s exactly why Asian civil rights organizations are suing the Ivy League colleges for rejecting Asian students based on race. Jews, Asian Indians and other minorities are similarly discriminated against unless their families have alumni who contribute large amounts to the college in question. And it is by no means only Ivy League colleges that do this. Some public funded state universities are also notorious for their worshiping at the graven idol of diversity rather than accepting students and doling out financial aid based on their accomplishments and qualifications rather than their ethnicity. and both Harvard and Yale are openly saying that they will continue to use race as a criterion for admissions.

This story is hardly being covered in much of the media. Imagine the uproar if Harvard was discriminating against blacks, Muslims or Latinos instead of Asians!

Another thing we have to understand is the collusion of whites on the Left with this scenario. Having made this a successful political tactic in grievance politics with one group, the Left is now trying to repeat this tactic with other groups. The idea, of course is divide and conquer, with those not in the select groups, particularly white men being the target.

The way to counter this tactic is (a)not to cringe and cower but to respond aggressively and expose those using it as the real racists they are…ridicule works particularly well (b) use the court systems to punish those who use discrimination as ‘virtue signaling’ (3) Boycott companies, media sites and universities who practice, promote or reward this kind of bigotry. (4) Use our DOJ to prosecute those who violate our laws on this matter where applicable and have zero tolerance for violence that is race based or attempts to silence critics of this kind of racism…provided someone either wakes Jeff Sessions up from his nap or ‘retires’ him.

Laura Rambeau Lee: Racism directed at Whites and Asians is a tool the left uses to engender feelings of victimization in minorities. It’s easier to blame an unjust society for ones failings than to take personal responsibility. It’s also easier to manipulate people if they have been told their circumstances are no fault of their own, and that Whites and Asians are born with an undeserved privilege and have reaped the rewards of this privilege with little to no work or effort.

The problem is there is no way to fight this kind of racism. There is no worse thing that can happen to someone than to be labeled as racist. It has destroyed people’s livelihoods and lives. Look at what happened to Roseanne Barr for a stupid Tweet. I believe we understand this and also understand no matter how we react we cannot win. If we are proud of our heritage the left labels us white supremacists, Nazis or KKK supporters. A rational person understands that one can be proud of their heritage without diminishing the heritage of others. Unfortunately we are not dealing with rational people when it comes to the left. Their entire ideology plays on the emotions of others to build their embittered ranks.

Well, there it is!

Make sure to drop by every Monday for the WoW! Magazine Forum. And enjoy WoW! Magazine 24-7 with some of the best stuff written in the ‘net. Take from me, you won’t want to miss it.

Forum: What Was Your First Job?

Every Monday, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question:
What was your first job?

Doug Hagin: First job? A friends dad hired me to work at his welding shop. I swept, A LOT!, I ran errands, I went to get lunch, which the boss paid for, up to $5, and when we had jobs on the road I did whatever was needed. Never really learned to weld too well, but it was good experience. Oh, and I got paid a whopping, $3.60 an hour to boot.

Patrick O’Hannigan: My first job was spending one summer helping my high school library convert from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress annotation. It was basic data entry for poor pay, but my friend John had the same assignment, and we made those Hawaiian mornings on old computers fun by taking turns writing an adventure story when we got bored. The only rule we had was that we could only write one paragraph apiece before handing off to the other kid. By the end of the summer, we had a short, cheerfully nonsensical story with an odd assortment of characters who had their hands full dealing with random implausible mayhem.

Laura Rambeau Lee: One evening my dad sat me down at the kitchen table with a cash drawer and taught me how to count back change. I caught on easily and at the age of 12 I went to work in the family drug store/soda fountain (which later became a luncheonette) in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I was incredibly shy and really was not excited about having to speak to people but knew I would be expected to work once I was old enough. My older sister had already been working a couple of years since she is two years older than me. I started at the soda fountain making sodas, shakes, malteds, scooping out ice cream and making sundaes, cones, and banana splits. Within a year I was also working on the drug store side, where we carried Hallmark Cards, 45 rpm records, toys and other sundries. We were also the Trailways bus stop and ticket station.

I learned a lot about owning and running a business and gained a lot of confidence in my abilities at an early age, which has served me well throughout my business career. It was very rewarding making money and being able to buy things I wanted without having to ask anyone. My starting wage was $.50 per hour. After we sold the business and moved to Florida (I was almost 15), when I turned 16 I got a job at a big chain drug store and worked there the balance of my high school and college years. One thing for certain, I decided early on I did not want to work in retail as my life’s career. I never wanted to work nights and weekends if I did not have to. I started in banking and have worked in the title insurance business ever since. Many years later I came to understand the importance of parents knowing the abilities of their children and encouraging them and setting expectations for them. Every little accomplishment increases self confidence and builds self esteem. A valuable life lesson indeed.

Well, there it is!

Make sure to drop by every Monday for the WoW! Magazine Forum. And enjoy WoW! Magazine 24-7 with some of the best stuff written in the ‘net. Take from me, you won’t want to miss it.

Forum: Russia, Friend Or Enemy?

Tags

Foreign Affairs, President Donald J. Trump, RUSSIA, Vladimir Putin

Every Monday, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question:

Russia, Friend Or Enemy?

Rob Miller: I think President Trump is taking exactly the right stance on Russia. They are competitors, neither friend or foe at this time. We will need Putin’s help to fight the war of jihad, and Putin is finally coming around that he can’t control Iran like he used to… he doesn’t want the Israelis taking matters into their own hands in Syria, which could lead to Russian casualties and a major war. Yes, he put out the de riguer language about how Iran’s nuclear power is ‘controlled’ but he knows what a lie it is and so does Trump. Both of them made a point of including Netanyahu in the loop and reaffirming their commitment to Israel’s security, and unlike a former U.S. president, Putin is serious about this and so is Donald Trump.

Russia, as Putin has stated before needs the U.S. as a superpower, but he’s essentially a Russian nationalist. As he said, he doesn’t trust Trump and Trump doesn’t trust him but both look out for the interests of their respective nations, and they are now, as Putin said  ‘looking for points of contact and mutual interests.

The entire nonsense about Russia meddling in our elections is hypocrisy in the extreme. Putin was diplomatic enough not to mention it, but President trump’s predecessor openly meddled serious in democratic elections in Israel, the UK and Nigeria among others. Democrats, who said nothing about it at that time have their nerve raging about Russia meddling in an election. We even put a regime in power in the Ukraine that was openly anti-Russian. I wonder how we would react if Russia or China put a regime in Mexico that was blatantly anti-USA?

It’s a pity Trump felt compelled to apologize and back track on what was really courageous diplomacy. Instead of taking the easy way out, cancelling the summit over Mueller’s bull, he went ahead knowing that no mater what happened he’d be crucified by the Left and their media. If he had been aggressive towards Putin, they would have wailed about a war monger president he doesn’t understand diplomacy. Since he decided to really exercise true diplomacy and be honest about how both countries are responsible for th ebad relations between Russia and the U.S. he’s being crucified as a traitor and ‘Putin’s puppet.

It’s obvious who the real traitors are, at this point.

Don Surber:Any discussion of Russia should begin by drawing the distinction between this country and the Soviet Union, which was a far larger country that included Georgia and Ukraine. To its credit, the USSR was one of the few socialist states that had toilet paper.

Russia is larger than the United States with less than half the people. Texas has a larger economy than Russia with one-fifth the population.

While Russia has a lot of nukes, I cannot see much use for nukes in any kind of war. You blow one off, and the world will crush you.

Still, those nukes carry sway politically.

But the biggest asset Russia has is its natural gas and oil which Germany needs because it foolishly banned fracking.

Thus the USA cannot look at Russia as a friend or ally, but rather as a big old bear that is missing most of its teeth, but it has this very valuable pot of honey that our biggest frenemy in Europe wants. Putin has masterfully played the USA media into making him this larger-than-life Rasputin (McCain was no help when he said when I look into his eyes, I see KGB). Putin is an animal trainer in a third-rate circus with this bear on a unicycle. Interesting but not very practical.

Be wary, but friendly. His help with North Korea and Syria are appreciated.

Dave Schuler: Is Russia a friend or an enemy of the U. S.? Both. Neither. It is a different country from the U. S. and as such has foreign policy objectives different from ours. As has been mentioned by others today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was apocalyptic and milliennialist. Russia is irredentist. Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have been parts of Russia or the Soviet Union since 1793 and Georgia has been since the first decade of the 19th century. All of these areas now have populations of ethnic Russians due to explicit programs of Russification in the 19th and 20th centuries. I don’t point these historical facts out to justify them but merely because of the role they play in present day Russian foreign policy objectives.

Those objectives may be summarized as

1. Present Russian territorial integrity.
2. Access to warm water ports, e.g. Sevastopol, Tartus.
3. Defense of Russians in Russia’s “near abroad”, i.e. Baltics, Ukraine, and the small population of Russians in George
4. Defense of Slavs.
5. Defense of Orthodoxy
Again, I’m not seeking to justify these objectives, merely identifying them. IMO following the collapse of the Soviet Union the U. S. squandered an opportunity for establishing a more cordial relationship between Russia the United States through a series of actions including
• Interfering with Russian elections and domestic politics
• Defeating Saddam Hussein, a major Soviet ally and customer, in the Gulf War
• Bombing Serbia without UN Security Council authorization
• Reneging on its promise not to enlarge NATO by admitting former Warsaw Pact countries
• Invading Iraq and removing its government without UN sanction
• Admitting the former Soviet Republics in the Baltic to NATO
• Assisting in the overthrow of the Libyan government in violation of UN Security Council mandate
• Threatening to admit Ukraine and Georgia to NATO
• Supporting Al Qaeda in its attempt at overthrowing the Syrian government
• Supporting the overthrow of the legitimately elected (and pro-Russian) government of Ukraine by an anti-Russian and purportedly neo-Nazi group
and there are others including generally dismissing, demeaning, and belittling Russia over the period of the last 25 years. That is a tragedy and contrary to U. S. interests. There is no more important bilateral relationship in the world than that of the U. S. and Russia. Our two countries are the only two either of which has the capability of destroying the world. A less hostile relationship can only be good.

Finally, China and Iran are not natural allies for Russia. Quite the opposite they’re natural adversaries. By comparison Russia’s interests and U. S. interests rarely interfere with one another. We should be able to cooperate with one another where they intersect.

One final word. It would be interesting to discuss this question (friend or foe?) in the context of other countries, particularly China, India, and Germany.

Bookworm Room: Is it too coy to call Russia a frenemy? The reality is that modern Russia is the tail end of a once great empire. Its current population is shrinking and its economy is a disaster, but it still has those nuclear weapons, a worldwide influence network, and at its helm an incredibly cold, cruel, effective leader. Putin’s leadership abilities (they may not be used for good, but they are still leadership abilities), coupled with eight years of Obama’s feckless “leading from behind,” has given Russia a lot more leverage than it should have. That’s the reality Trump has to deal with.

Meanwhile, there’s China: 1.5 billion people, the world’s largest standing army, a sense of manifest destiny that would have been comfortably in place at the height of the 19th century expansionist colonial era, and a willingness to cheat in the world marketplace, steal technology and other protected ideas, manipulate currencies, and do anything else to maintain an economic edge. That doesn’t make China a current enemy, as in on-the-ground hot warfare, but it makes it a very dangerous potential enemy.

When it comes to both Russia and China, it’s much better for the U.S. to have a working relationship with them than to have open enmity. Moreover, when it comes to balancing power, there’s a lot to be said for a Russia / U.S. alliance — a loose one — to offset China’s manpower edge.

The reality is that politics invariably puts us in bed with people and nations that are not nice. The Lefties weren’t upset when Roosevelt partnered with Stalin to defeat the Nazis. Of course, the Lefties adored Stalin even as he was mass murdering his own people but still…. Even now, 70+ years later, when the Lefties can no longer deny Stalin’s depredations, they’re still comfortable with Roosevelt partnering with a mass murdering former Hitler pal because it was necessary to do so. The enemy of my enemy is my temporary ally and all that.

As is the case with North Korea, I see nothing wrong with Trump offering to work with two dictators, provided that no harm comes to us. That these leaders — Kim Jong Un, Putin, and all the other nasties out there — are dictators is certainly a problem for their citizens, but that doesn’t mean in geopolitics that it has to be a non-starter for us.

The only thing Trump needs to do is make sure that these evolving relationships are mutually beneficial. The last thing we want is to see the Obama years repeated, with Obama giving up everything he had to dictators around the world while getting nothing in return for America. As long as there’s a quid pro quo that benefits America, both in terms of the economy and national security, world affairs demand that sometimes you make nice with bad people. Only Lefty governments believe that you make nice with bad people to America’s detriment.

Rather than waffle on here, I’ll just say that Trump represents the necessary end of the Wilson doctrine that insisted that it was America’s responsibility to shed her citizens’ blood on battlefields around the world, in order to export democracy to ungrateful, profoundly undemocratic nations.

Laura Rambeau Lee: To say our relationship with Russia is complicated would be an understatement. America and Russia are absolute ideological opposites with radically different objectives. That being said, both countries have apocalyptic capabilities and the possibility of mutually assured destruction requires we maintain a continuing dialogue. President Trump sees Putin and Russia as a competitor and understands we must find ways to work together when it is mutually beneficial. He has a lot of work to do to reestablish our position of strength in the eyes of the world and particularly with Russia, which became painfully weak during the previous eight years of the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Clinton’s bumbling attempts at diplomacy. I suspect after Helsinki, Putin knows without a doubt President Trump will not sell out American interests and that he will do what is necessary to maintain our position of strength on the world stage.

Well, there it is!

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